Report 1807
Report #1807 Skillset: Discernment Skill: Assess/Contemplate/Discern Org: Hallifax Status: Completed Sept 2017 Furies' Decision: Solution 2, potentially with Veyils' suggestions Problem: Many classes are heavily reliant on the information given by discern, assess, and contemplate (I'll just group them under discern for now) to make decisions as to what to do with offence. For example, manakillers need to discern to know what mana level their target is at so they can catch them when they are below the threshold required. However, the command to discern needs to be sent to the server and the information received by the client before the player can actually use it. This basically inflates the balance time players have based on how high their ping is, as well as making it so that stratagems can't be used as freely in these situations. Given how important balance times are generally seen to be, this report seeks to close the gap between low and high ping players when using a class that is reliant on discern. 7 R: 5 Solution #1: Make discern/contemplate/assess not require balance/equilibrium. R: 0 Solution #2: Make a new syntax for discern/contemplate/assess with the FREE modifier after it (e.g. DISCERN FALAERON FREE) that can be used while off balance/equilibrium, with a 1 second cooldown in between. 1 R:10 Solution #3: As per solution 2, but instead of a cooldown, increase the mana cost of doing this by 50% Player Comments: ---on 9/4 @ 01:14 sets as pending ---on 9/5 @ 19:41 writes: Solutions 1 or 2 are my preference. Solution 3 would be an improvement but I don't feel its reasonable for high latency to pay a tax when they're already inately disadvantaged, so would prefer to avoid that if possible. ---on 9/6 @ 19:49 writes: I would not like to see regular discern change from how it is but I'm not opposed to setting up new ways. Would reject solution 1. Solution one would be bad for high ping players overall as spamming is an effective tool and this would cause discern to have a huge mana drain when spammed. Solution 2 with a 1 second cool down would allow folks to spam it a bit and not get wrecked. ---on 9/6 @ 19:53 writes: I dont see how this is going to really help high ping players like me though. If I discern free when i'm off balance I'm going to have to discern again when im on balance against because there is a high chance that someone has already sipped or healed up. You need to discern when your ready to do the attack to make sure your attack is effective. This wont really change how mana killers operate in my eyes. We'll still have to do it on balance and still get stuck with the discern/send command to absolve/enemy sips between the absolve command being entered and the skill hitting. I'm not opposed to the report just the solutions provided wont actually fix the problem proposed. ---on 9/7 @ 20:28 writes: Right now there are two choices when it comes to discern strategy: 1) You just discern in front of every attack and stratagem your attacks anyway, meaning your most up to date discern information will always be out-of-date by however many seconds your attack's balance timer is. 2) you only stratagem your discern but wait for your client to receive the information from the server before sending another command to the server to make your actual attack. This means your real balance timer is actually 1.5 times whatever your ping is, and your discernment will be out-of-date by about 0.5 times your ping. ---on 9/7 @ 20:35 writes: By making discern usable off balance, you introduce a third strategy, which is to discern around 1.5 times your ping before you expect to get balance back, and in the time between receiving the information and getting balance back, queue up a stratagem with the attack you want to do based on this information. Sure, this doesn't fix everything for high-ping users, but it allows people to continue to use stratagems for their attacks at the cost of slightly outdated discern information. Of course, it'd not really be possible to time this perfectly, so let's just say most people would discern around 2 times their ping before balance comes back. At 0.3s ping (which is actually lower than what I've heard some people consistently get), on a quick attack balance of 3s, you're still only looking at 0.6s vs 3s, five times the difference. ---on 9/8 @ 01:54 writes: I get where your coming from and this just reminded me of an old idea that would essentially solve this ping issue. Game side if statements are a thing in some games i've seen. If we had something like "DISCERN Danquik <50 MANA TOADCURSE Danquik ELSE LASH Danquik" then that would basically fix the problem statement totally. I'm not sure how viable this is but it sounds like an awesome thing to have. ---on 9/8 @ 02:08 writes: I can get behind Veyil's idea ---on 9/8 @ 04:07 writes: Would definitely be for that idea if it's viable. I just assumed it'd be too difficult to take into account every single use-case for something like this ---on 9/8 @ 14:13 writes: Could probably make it simpler with 'discern ', but you are adding a lot to discern suddenly with the other new args report for discern coming through ---on 9/8 @ 14:15 writes: Also by doing this you are removing the cost of failure in some instakills, as you should never fail a vitals insta with this method. Whether this is a good or bad thing is debateable. ---on 9/8 @ 16:12 writes: The other thing that dawns on me with this, and makes me think on second thought maybe it's not such a good idea, is you can then just always do 'discern instakill else attack' and at that point you might as well just have the game always instakill if it can on your attack since you are basically removing the element of human error anyways ---on 9/8 @ 16:32 writes: I think Danquik's last point above is really good, and makes me not like Veyil's idea much at all. I think the original report solutions are all good - they will require some cleverness to use well in order to regain that 1.5*ping time, but would be doable. I think my preference is for Sol2, but that might be because I think discern spam is annoying. ---on 9/9 @ 02:59 writes: I have to agree that I don't think being able to do a server-side if/else is a great idea on this at this point. ---on 9/9 @ 18:31 writes: Well right now you can do that if you have good enough ping Danquik. You can discern/assess on every action and respond accordingly. I know of quite a lot of the american side folks with good connections who perform every action based on assess/discern triggers. Its not viable for folks with a delayed response time. In game if statements would level the field I guess. ---on 9/11 @ 11:45 writes: Hmm, I am not sure how I feel about the solutions. I agree the problem exists. I generally would wonder if we would not at least remove the third party line on discern then to prevent people just being spam-fed on the receiving end. Hmm, maybe solution 2 with a 0.5 second delay, so you would basically be checking it once while you're off balance / right before you think your eq comes back... thinking about it, generally solution two is my preferred to this. You'd basically have to time it around your ping and your perception as to when you're going to get balance/eq back, but it might be a good thing. Server side ifs: on the one hand cool, on the other hand I agree with Danquiks assessment of their problems. They'd need some form of cost attached and then we'd be putting people with bad pings on the bad side again. ---on 9/14 @ 14:04 writes: I wouldn't mind server-side script like that. I don't think it'd complicate things any more than it is, just move things from client to server. Otherwise any other solution doesn't seem like it could address the problem as well. ---on 9/14 @ 14:04 writes: I wouldn't mind server-side ---on 9/14 @ 16:11 writes: Yea I mean in general folks with good ping can run their entire offense off discern/assess where as folks without can't. Server side IF statements would remove this in the same way that stratagems remove the command delay. ---on 9/15 @ 14:09 writes: Just to note, you could achieve something similar by making all mana/ego/health instakills do nothing on fail (no balance/power loss), but I'm not convinced that it's actually good for the game. To counter my own feeling, people with really low ping never really have to worry about this though since they can just trigger off discern and be confident that it'll work. It's just awkward. You can't really balance around different pings. Low ping will have a big advantage, or we end up oversimplifying everything. /Sorry for being rambly. I'm still not sure how I feel about this. ---on 9/18 @ 04:08 writes: I honestly like Veyils's suggestion in the comments best. Out of the provided solutions, 2.